rre reminded him, "and his beautiful
boy friends, they are all dust too, thank God!"

"It was a queer fate that Stanton met," suggested Dirk. "He thought that
he would save his life by going over to our enemies, and, instead of
that, he lost it."

* * * * *

"Poor Stanton," said Steinholt. "He was born that way, I suppose, and I,
for one, am ready to forgive and forget him. And now," continued the
Teuton, "I hope that we didn't do too much damage to that little boat of
the Lodorians. If we could get just a little peep at the inside of it we
might learn the secret of its contrivance. And then, my friends, we
could do a little journeying ourselves."

"Have you any theory regarding it?" asked Fragoni.

"Teuxical intimated that it rode the magnetic currents which, of course,
flow through all the suns and planets in the universe," replied
Steinholt. "We have been working along that line ourselves, of course,
and it probably won't be very long anyway before we have the solution of
interplanetary travel."

"Those Lodorians would have solved it for us if it hadn't been for
that artificial lightning," said Lazarre. "That's powerful stuff,
Steinholt."

"Yes, with that three-thousand-foot Worldwide Tower to hurl it from,"
agreed Steinholt, "we can get fair range with it. If the Lodorians
hadn't left the well of their ship open, though, the lightning wouldn't
have done us much good. I was afraid, too, for a time, that we might
have trouble in welding that automatic wireless circuit box to the
bottom of the ship."

Dirk, in the meantime, had brought the plane down to within a half-mile
of the leviathan, and he was holding it poised there.

"It seems to me," he said, after scrutinizing the monster for a couple
of minutes, "that it is moving in the water. It is!" he exclaimed.
"Steinholt! Look!"

* * * * *

Only a comparatively short time had elapsed since the last bolt of
lightning had vanished back into the darkness.

"It is still rocking with the force of the shock that we gave it,"
asserted Steinholt. "You would be rocking, too, if you had been tickled
by a bolt like that one."

"It is rising, I tell you!" said Dirk. "The front end of it is slowly
getting higher in the water!"

"You're right, Dirk," said Fragoni, excitement straining his voice.
"Look! It just dropped back into the water!"

Then, as they watched, the movements of the leviathan became